Food, cooking & some related thoughts. Raving included…
Yesterday I spent some time making nenua, N-E-N-U-A. It’s a vegetable primarily cooked in North Indian families and belongs to the gourd family of vegetables. A close relative would be the turai, but beware: nenua has its own allure. In English, it’s called sponge gourd. If you carefully look at a nenua, it seems extremely innocuous, although it’s peeled rough and groovy. However, once you take its peel off, you can’t pick it apart from, say, a cucumber. It is one of the more signature Bihari dishes that I grew up eating, more so than say litti or even sattu. Summers and nenua go hand in hand.
While, it’s obviously delicious in a really simple, plain manner, Nenua in of itself wouldn’t strike out as a peculiar dish for any culture. I would say it’s got one of the more sleeper tastes. Eating it is simply an act of responding to the calls of HOME, nostalgia if anything.
It’s really easy to cook. The majority of the work is done in the slicing and dicing. So make sure you have six to seven good-sized fruits, peel them properly, dice them properly. The dicing bit is really important because, as the more trained chefs would tell you, nenua has a lot of water content, so it cooks in its own water. And the better you dice the vegetable, the easier it is to cook, as the water is released quickly. The way to cook it is simple. You just start roasting some garlic and some asafoetida together, add some chillies, and you wait for the misture to turn brown. Add your nenua, mix it up, add some salt, some turmeric, mix them properly, and then it’s just a waiting game within 10 to 15 minutes. It’s all, it starts releasing its water and starts cooking in it, and then just a few more minutes of heating, waiting, and smashing the vegetable, and you’re done.
It may come as a shock to the people who know me that I have started cooking vegetables as well. Past eight months of regular cooking has rarely seen me leave a session without breaking a few bones and killing a few birds. And yet, lately, for the past three to four meals, I have decided to give the more stationary angels of God a chance on my frying pan.. I still hate vegetables — and yet I make them for, lately I am beginning to appreciate life in its more selfless form.
You don’t just cook for yourself; you cook for your friends, you also cook for your family, you sometimes even cook for guests who might not even appear. It’s rarely a self-absorbed experience. It’s supposed to be a communal experience; it’s supposed to be done with everyone else. And I’ve started feeling more of this ever since I started raving properly. And to be honest, me cooking this nenua is what raving is all about. Much like cooking, it’s all about peace, love, unity, respect. It’s about spreading the message of God — which is the message of love. It’s about loving everybody. It’s about ensuring that everybody gets to go home on a full stomach, and being united in that experience. It’s about respecting people’s beliefs, whether vegetarians or non-vegetarians or whoever. The central point being, raving in its most basic form is as primal to human beings as cooking and sharing a meal.
If you ask most people who are not involved in the culture or in the raving lifestyle and ask them what a rave is all about, the most common answers you’re gonna get is One, it’s about partying for youngsters. Two, it’s about illegal drug use, recreational drug use. Three, it’s about the kind of music that normal people don’t get, but others dance in a zombie-like state. And to be honest, your answer would not be completely wrong, but mostly incomplete. Because while raving as a lifestyle does have segues from the above mentioned facets, at its very core, raving has nothing to do with the kind of music or the kind of substances or the kind of people involved. Raving is about understanding some basic things in life. One, it’s about being one with nature. It’s just a casually thrown-out expression. Being one with nature is, it means allowing yourself, your mind and your body to be in sync with nature as it was supposed to be, which means for the body, it means that it’s allowed to move and dance and have all freedoms of motions. as possible. Now, of course, it is made easily possible through trance music or any high BPM music, but again, the music is not a necessity. Now, I’ve not done any big research on this, however, I once read a book by Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello, where the main character often dances herself, often without music, to a state of trance. And it is a state of both euphoria and meditation for her. And from what I know, cultures in the past have had similar expressions of freedom. What does it mean for the mind? For the mind, it means, one, obviously, acceptance: acceptance of other people’s expression of love and freedom, an absence of judgment, the feeling that we are one with nature, altogether, and all of us, without any feeling of selfishness. And obviously, respect, respect for those around you, respect for where you are, respect for the creator, which in a lot of cases is the DJ.
Raving and the acceptance of the lifestyle changes you. Ever since I’ve started to rave, I can’t help but admit that not only has it changed me, but it has also changed the people who started raving with me. I am more comfortable accepting that I’m capable of feeling love, capable of feeling warmth, capable of being affected by grief and loss. I have become more comfortable acknowledging my weaknesses, acknowledging other people’s embrace, other people’s love. I find it easier to talk to people, find it easy to communicate my feelings and also enable others to communicate their feelings. I’ve become more comfortable listening. Maybe that’s who I was from the get-go, but raving has allowed me to be myself.
Currently, I think I have two sets of families. I lead a double life & I am sure a lot of you feel that way too.. One is obviously my organic family and friend group. The second friend group, perhaps, is the one I’m connected with through my raves, the bRaveHearts. It’s possible that I don’t know enough about them outside the raves, but what I do know is when I meet them in the moment, there’s nothing but love. There’s nothing but acceptance. There’s nothing but the most pure form of glee I can have. And I know that life’s going to take many turns. I’m going to have different challenges, but through all of that, I’m going to have those few moments where I can express myself the way I’m supposed to, and for that, I’ll have my family with me. You know who you are!